Sylvia Plath’s images, dark and heavy weigh down the soul while the reader is immersed in her words. You can feel the currents of her madness pulling you down. Not insanity but madness is the word for her. The solemn anger that she feels kept down for thirty years by a father who died when she was ten is cold but no less fierce.
She searches for the man, in her memory and in a world where his hometown name is common. She cannot find his root and sees his image stretched from San Francisco to Massachusetts, “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God” . Her images are marble-heavy as well. Down trodden like a foot in a shoe the only choice she makes is death.
His body died when she was ten. From then on, she constructs him in her mind, constructs and destroys him. Each image is one of repression. She builds him up as the iconic image of a fascist, a Nazi. Each image is carefully built, the bright blue eye, the cleft chin.
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
That image is followed by how he died when she was ten and she tried to follow him into death when she was twenty to get back to him. Although she creates her father as a dominant Aryan, she paints a different picture of herself. From the pallid foot in the shoe to that of a being Jewish amid images of concentration she is almost down trodden. But she is not beaten, the Gipsy prevails. In the end, she drives a steak through his vampire heart to save her own.
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. Daddy. Daddy. 1962. Poem. <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15291>.
